


man out of time

by sodium_amytal



Category: 11/22/63 - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, Canon Divergence, F/M, POV First Person, Romance, time-travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-13
Updated: 2019-09-13
Packaged: 2020-10-17 22:40:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20628707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sodium_amytal/pseuds/sodium_amytal
Summary: Sadie lives, but the past still resists change.





	man out of time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [janie_tangerine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/janie_tangerine/gifts).

> I wanted to explore what might happen if Sadie had survived, and as much as I would have loved a happily-ever-after in the '60s for these two, I couldn't shake the canon worldbuilding that King set up re: the past trying to set things right against interference. But I'm a sucker for happy endings in one form or another, so I compromised. Here's hoping you dig it.

The past didn't like to be changed; it was obdurate. Certainly I had seen enough examples in my few years living in it.

"You'll never make it in time. I will. Give me the gun," Sadie said.

I wouldn't let her come with me. I _couldn't_. Maybe it was selfish, putting my own personal happiness ahead of potentially saving the future, but I had almost lost her once. "No. Hurry back to Main Street and follow the motorcade. I need you to be my second pair of eyes."

Her face screwed up in confusion. "Why—" Then she understood; if there _was_ a second shooter as so many conspiracy theories had lauded, I wanted her on the lookout. Even if I stopped Oswald, the past might decide to harmonize in the worst way, to right itself against my intervention.

"Be careful," she warned me. "Don't do anything stupid."

_I think it's too late for that, sweetheart._

* * *

Would it have mattered if Sadie had come with me? I've run the numbers in my head over and over, but of course you can never know these things for certain. I think, in the end, the past doesn't want to be changed. Sure, you can shuffle some things around, but that resistance is always there, and sometimes it's just too strong to tear through. I'd known this going through the rabbit hole the third time: _the resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act._

Al had learned that lesson the hard way, suffering blown tires, a blown engine, and a collapsed bridge, all to save Carolyn Poulin from the bullet that would paralyze her. I had hit plenty of speedbumps trying to save the Dunning family. But trying to take out Lee Harvey Oswald, to change the entire course of modern American history? Was it any surprise the rubber-band of the past snapped back into place?

I'd managed to make it up the stairs on my protesting legs. I'd even managed to fire at Oswald and knock his fatal rifle slug askew, just off-course enough to save Kennedy's life. At least for a few more seconds. Since I'd sent Sadie back to follow the motorcade to Dealey Plaza, she had been in the crowd watching the president roll by. According to Sadie, Oswald's first bullet hit the street. His second bullet struck a window in the county courthouse—courtesy of my interference. But the "magic bullet" came from behind Kennedy, a trajectory that did not match the location of Oswald's sniper nest.

_The past is obdurate, you see._

"I knew you would stop him," Sadie said to me that night. We were under the pecan tree in her backyard. Her right hand quivered, holding a cigarette. "And you were right to send me there as a lookout. There was a Secret Service agent in the car behind Kennedy. When the first shot went off, he—the agent—reached for a rifle underneath his seat. After the second shot, Kennedy's car and the one behind him sped up. The agent was trying to stand on the seat to get a better shot, and as he did the car sped up. He lost his footing and pulled the trigger, I suppose on accident."

I sighed. "And the rifle was pointed right at Kennedy."

Sadie nodded.

The cover-up angle of the assassination made sense when you looked at it this way. The Warren Commission would omit the testimony of ballistics experts that confirmed two distinct shooters; the type of bullet that hit Kennedy never matched the rounds Oswald was known to have used. Oswald's insistence that he was a patsy lined up with the government using him as a scapegoat, and his eventual death at the hands of Jack Ruby would definitely point to a cover-up. The American public could swallow the idea of a Communist sympathizer like Oswald being responsible for Kennedy's death, at least at first.

"I didn't tell them what I really saw," Sadie said. "I may not know what the future holds, but I know enough to keep my mouth shut about certain matters."

"You did the right thing, Sadie," I said. I didn't want to think of what might happen if she had let the truth slip during our hours-long questioning by police and government officials.

She let out a smoky breath, and tears rolled down her cheeks. "It was all for nothing. You came all this way, sacrificed so much, and in the end the past still bit you like a mad dog."

"It's not all bad. I met you."

She huffed a humorless laugh and took another drag off the cigarette. "I suppose that means you're not going back to… whenever you came from."

"Not on your life, honey."

"But won't you be changing the past by staying here? If the past doesn't want to be changed…" Sadie shook her head as though shaking away some unpleasant thought.

"I'm sure you're right, but staying with you in Jodie isn't as drastic a change as trying to stop an assassination. I think the past operates on degrees, and the future won't change much if I stay or go. We're just ordinary folks, Sadie. Kennedy business aside, you and I don't make waves."

She smiled, small at first, then it spread across her face. She leaned her head on my shoulder. "Will you tell me something else about the future, George?"

"Why don't you stick around and see it for yourself?"

* * *

Sadie and I were wed the following spring; Deke sat in the front row, and I'd like to believe Miz Mimi was there in spirit. But just as I thought it would, the past tried to protect itself; maybe it would allow us a wedding, but adding kids into the equation was a recipe for disaster. For months, we struggled to conceive—though calling it a 'struggle' seems uncharitable; we certainly enjoyed trying. But I saw no reason why a perfectly healthy man and woman couldn't conceive a child unless something stood in our way.

"Is it the past, George?" Sadie asked me as I drove her to our clinic appointment. "Is that why we're having so much trouble?"

"It could be a lot of things," I told her, but I think I knew even then, because it hardly came as a shock when the doctor sat us down and told us Sadie was infertile. She took the blow with grace, but I could see the hopelessness in her eyes.

While adoption would have been a viable route in another life, I couldn't risk the likelihood that my false identity would be exposed if we applied. Because the past was hell-bent on keeping things square. I'd told her we wouldn't make waves, and wasn't a child a wave of its own? Hell, every breath I took in this altered timeline was a wave.

"It's not so bad," she said on the drive home. "At least we have each other." I didn't know if she really believed that, or if she was trying to reassure herself as well as me. "I think I always suspected something like this would happen… But it could have been worse. I'm thankful that it wasn't."

I considered the alternative—finding a pregnant Sadie huddled in the bathroom with smears of blood on her inner thighs—and shuddered.

* * *

Every now and then the past threw me a curveball: a near-miss with a semi-truck; a stumble on slippery stairs; a run-in with an angry dog at the park. Sadie and I knew enough to avoid roller coasters or any type of amusement with complicated moving parts. The future had plenty of gruesome theme park accidents in store, and if the past was going to take me out, I'd prefer not to step into its jaws if I could help it.

Maybe it all sounds like a waste, as though I traded a normal life in the future for a somewhat neutered one in the past. And maybe I did, but it was for _Sadie_. A life with her, however restricted, was worth the sacrifice. I never considered it a sacrifice to begin with, but whether Sadie herself did was a constant thorn of worry in my mind. Some nights I would lie awake and wonder if Sadie regretted the choices that had gotten her snarled in the machine of the past. For me, it had been an easy trade to make, because I knew what lay in store for me in the future. Been there, done that, bought the souvenir t-shirt, as the saying goes. But Sadie had no such certainty; her life without George Amberson was one big question mark, and the jury was still out on whether said life would have been an improvement over this one. There was no way to know, save for returning to the rabbit hole and leaving the Land of Ago. But if I did that only to find Sadie's life was cut short, or that she'd run into another John Clayton…

Our lives together weren't all gloom and doom; we had some pretty good years, four of them in all. Sadie became an English teacher at Denholm Consolidated High School. I published _The Murder Place_ under a pseudonym, just as Mimi had suggested, and made my living writing short pieces for magazines and the occasional novel. As much as I enjoyed teaching, I didn't want to push my luck. Ellie might have let my false identity slide under the radar, but I imagined the State Board of Education would take a good, hard look at George Amberson if he applied for another year of teaching.

The past, after all, is obdurate.

* * *

A short but sweet obituary in the Dallas Morning News' back pages read: George T. Amberson, 44, died Wednesday, Nov. 22, at his home in Jodie, Texas. Born April 22, 1923, Amberson became a much-loved English teacher and drama club director at Denholm Consolidated High School before publishing two novels and many short fiction pieces. He is survived by his wife, Sadie. George will be fondly remembered for bringing joy, love, and laughter to many lives. Services to be held Saturday at Grace Memorial Church, with burial at West Hill Cemetery.

* * *

It was a heart attack that took me out over my typewriter that afternoon while Sadie was at the high school. Death, I discovered, felt a lot like dropping through the rabbit-hole, at least until I opened my eyes and awoke in my bed with a cat sitting atop my chest, peering at my face.

Sadie and I had a cat, but this wasn't ours. This was my black cat, Elmore, from the Land of Ahead. The bedroom, too, was the same one I had left years ago.

I wasn't dead after all. At least not in this timeline. Had it all been a dream? That seemed impossible, given how immediate and clear my memories of Jodie, Derry, Oswald, and Sadie were. But if every trip to the past took two minutes, why did my bedside clock read 6:31 a.m? I hadn't been in bed when I took my trip, let alone in my own house.

It was only when I lifted my left hand to pet Elmore that I noticed it: the wedding ring Sadie had given me during our ceremony in 1964. My souvenir.

* * *

Things began to click into place after that. Through a few online searches, I came to discover what I'd already suspected: I'd been thrown into the Land of Ahead. While this seemed like the same timeline I'd left to go after Oswald, there were a few differences. For one, the Home of the Famous Fatburger had been replaced by an L.L. Bean Express. Al Templeton had passed away, presumably from the cancer he'd had the last time I saw him. The past, in the act of setting itself proper, had thrown me into a slightly altered future where I could no longer tamper with it through the rabbit-hole, because I didn't belong there, no matter how much I might want to.

I was almost afraid to search Sadie's name, fearing what I might find if I did, but curiosity got the better of me. Since George Amberson never existed here, Sadie's life shook out another way. She survived her run-in with John Clayton, thanks to Deke and Ellie. She never married, never left Jodie. Her accomplishments were many, including serving one term as mayor and four terms in the Texas State Legislature.

But, see, time-travel leaves residue. Al's trips to 1958 for cheap meat were proof of that. So was the ring on my finger. The past, as I've said before, harmonizes.

I'm on my way to Jodie now. There's a July Centennial Celebration coming up, and Sadie's been chosen as the citizen of the century. It's a long shot, but maybe she'll remember me; I certainly remember her.

The past is delicate, obdurate, but the future… well, the future's what we make of it, isn't it?


End file.
